Our Reflections – Making evaluation and monitoring work for Creative Black Country

The period between April 2021 – March 2022 was one of our most successful years for data collection and exceeding targets.

Now that all of the end of year reports have been submitted and the dust has settled, the Creative Black Country team (Part of Arts Council England, Creative People Places Programme) have been reflecting on what we felt worked well and how we might further develop our approaches to evaluation and monitoring for the year ahead. 

The evaluation of commissioned activity is overseen and collated by our Project Coordinator and Programme Administrator. One of the first tasks undertaken was a full review of the paperwork that’s sent out to commissioned artists/organisations. The paperwork was streamlined to reduce the number of attachments to be sent and all supporting documents were revised to ensure the information provided was clear, concise and to the point.

A new approach that we found to be effective is calling the lead artists/organisations to notify them when their proposal has been awarded monetary support. Having this initial conversation before a project gets underway is a nice way to introduce yourself, answer any questions or concerns they may have and to discuss the evaluation requirements so that they are aware of what they need to do from the beginning. We have found that building relationships like this has improved the overall data that is returned at the end of a project and artists have commented that they felt supported throughout the process.

To support the monitoring of our work, we create a quarterly document showing the demographic data from our audiences/participants, the areas we’ve commissioned work in and other statutory information to monitor including postcodes collected, volunteer time and any additional income (match, in-kind). This has been a useful document to monitor progress and the areas we need to focus on. It has also been helpful in presenting the information to the CBC consortia partnership and internal team in an easy-to-understand visual way.

We have also been exploring the features within the Impact & Insights Toolkit and found this to be an effective tool in evaluating activity. The main learning from using the toolkit would be to invest some time in establishing what, as an organisation, are the key things you wish to capture in the evaluation. Discuss whether it will be the best tool to use for a project at the commissioning stage, only use the ‘Dimension’ questions that are relevant and don’t make the surveys too long. We also ask the lead artist/organisation/group if there are any questions that they would like to include in the survey for participants.

Lastly, we have undertaken a full review of all our internal approaches and systems for data collection and made some changes along the way to make it work better for us and the generation of quarterly and yearly reports. This will be an ongoing process and we will continue to explore ways to improve.

We appreciate that evaluating an activity is often seen as the least glamourous aspect of delivering creative work, but it is often the reason why the work was able to be supported in the first place so we would like to say a huge thank you to all the artists, groups and organisations for the time they have taken to evaluate their projects and gather feedback from those taking part.